Lead by Example

Screenshot from animated video by Karina Branson/ConverSketch

The Veterinary Sustainability Alliance website features a short animated video, Veterinarians' role in addressing climate change, that gives suggestions on actions clinics can take.

Deadly wildfires that tore through Dr. Diccon Westworth's Northern California community in 2017 drove home to the veterinarian the potentially brutal effects of a changing climate on his patients' lives.

"We had burned animals come to us; lots of cats with burned paws," recalled Westworth, who practices at a hospital in Sonoma County.

Some of his colleagues were evacuated from their homes. Another hospital had to transfer its patients to the hospital where Westworth works, with both teams working out of the same place for weeks.

Following the immediate emergency, Westworth was restless. He thought about the health risks to companion animals, livestock and wildlife alike from the more frequent and fierce disasters associated with climate change. He thought about the ways in which his own profession contributes to the pollution driving the planet's warming.

Feeling compelled to take action, Westworth reached out to the local utility provider, Sonoma Clean Power, to learn how the hospital where he works could transition to electricity generated by renewable sources. The power provider and hospital worked up a plan to move the hospital toward 100% power from geothermal and solar sources. The hospital committed to the plan in November 2023, and the transition took effect before the end of the year.

Sonoma Clean Power is an energy provider that residents of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties in California can opt into. All-renewable power sometimes costs more than the standard rate, but that wasn't the case for his hospital, Westworth said. In general, he said, making the switch was easy: All it took was a call to the power provider, and the hospital owner, Mars Inc., supported the change.

The hospital also received grants through the utility to buy electric vehicle chargers and five electric bikes for staff use.

Westworth didn't stop there. Today, he is one of five veterinarians on the leadership team of the Veterinary Sustainability Alliance (VSA), a nonprofit formed two years ago that aims to provide resources on environmentally sustainable practices for the profession in the United States and Canada. Among the first tools the VSA debuted is a veterinary-clinic-specific carbon calculator to help North American practices quantify their greenhouse gas emissions.

Contributing to climate change solutions is something anyone can do, Westworth says: "You don't have to go and become an environmental scientist. What we need is people that get it in their own industry making a change. This is where things are really going to make the difference."

The VSA was founded when a handful of veterinarians realized there were few places where veterinary professionals in North America could access information or support about reducing their environmental impact.

Dr. Colleen Duncan, a professor of microbiology, immunology and pathology at Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and a founding member of VSA, credits her students with raising her awareness about the issue. Over the past decade, she said, students have demonstrated a marked interest in veterinary medicine's role in the climate crisis.

Duncan teaches a course in which students select a topic of interest relevant to the veterinary profession and develop a class presentation. In recent years, she said, more students have been choosing topics related to sustainability, such as air pollution, plastics pollution and biodiversity loss. This shift in student interest caused Duncan to pivot her own focus.

With colleagues at Colorado State, Duncan coauthored a paper published in 2020 that presents results from a survey of veterinarians about their beliefs, knowledge and interest in climate change. More than 600 veterinarians, mostly from the U.S., responded. The authors reported that overall, respondents were confident that climate change caused by human activity is happening and is affecting the health of humans and other animals.

Respondents also were in agreement that the profession should help educate the public about the health impacts of climate change. However, "most reported having had no educational opportunities within their veterinary medicine curriculum or access to continuing education on climate change," the researchers wrote.

"People are concerned about the topic, particularly as it relates to the health of the animals that they seek to make better and healthier," Duncan said in an interview. "But we also identified that it's largely not covered in [school] curricula. Veterinarians and veterinary team members — technicians and support staff — largely don't have a place to go for information."

Meanwhile, Duncan says, sustainability was coming up in conversations with veterinarians, peers and animal lovers in her community. It became clear that working only at the university was not going to be enough — there needed to be a place that could serve as a hub on sustainability for the larger community. The VSA provides resources on its website for all veterinary professionals.

The carbon calculator was developed by a team at Colorado State. Free to use, it is intended to enable clinic teams to measure their climate impact by inputting information such as the clinic's energy use, waste production, use of anesthetic gases and emissions from employee commuting.

The VSA also offers a guide for clinics to improve their sustainability, such as reviewing waste management protocols and asking suppliers for more eco-friendly products. The guide was co-created with the American and Canadian veterinary medical associations. In time, VSA leaders hope to create a "sustainable clinic" certification that practices can achieve by reducing their carbon footprint.

As a nonprofit, the VSA relies on donations for funding. So far, it's received a handful of contributions and has one corporate sponsor — Mars Inc., the biggest owner of veterinary practices in the world, with brands including Banfield, BluePearl and VCA. (Westworth's hospital is part of the VCA group.)

Veterinary medicine's footprint

Elements of veterinary medicine's environmental footprint, such as energy consumption, single-use plastics and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, are common to most other industries, as they are in homes. However, some elements are unique to the practice of medicine, whether for human or veterinary patients.

Inhaled anesthetics such as isoflurane and nitrous oxide, for instance, are potent greenhouse gases. Veterinary practices also use high volumes of single-use disposables such as gloves, gowns, caps and surgical drapes. Plastic or synthetic rubber single-use materials, like nitrile gloves, are petroleum-based, furthering their emissions impact.

Although the direct environmental effect of veterinary care has not been specifically quantified, it is far lower than that of human medicine's, which, according to an oft-quoted paper published in 2020, accounts for about 8.5% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. To give a rough impression of how much smaller veterinary medicine's role is, animal pharmaceuticals in the U.S. comprise just 2% of the nation's total pharmaceutical market measured by dollar value, according to the Animal Health Institute trade group.

Still, veterinary medicine is a multibillion-dollar industry, and through their work with animals, veterinarians are influential players in related industries, such as agriculture and pet food. Veterinarians are, for instance, at the forefront of moves to reduce methane, another potent greenhouse gas, emitted by belching ruminants like cows and sheep.

Partnering with Canada

Dr. Katie Clow, the VSA's Canadian director, is an assistant professor at the Ontario Veterinary College, where she researches vector-borne diseases. Impacts of the changing climate on disease patterns, including by increasing vector populations and expanding their range, are a primary focus of hers.

Having both Canadian and U.S. representation within the VSA was necessary to address the unique needs and abilities of the veterinary industry in each country, she said: "The population base, the structure of how care is delivered, access to different products, political space, all of those things, are different between countries, so having the perspective between each country is important."

No matter where they are, one of the biggest challenges Clow sees inhibiting veterinarians from addressing sustainability issues is that they're already overburdened with work.

"Our profession is under a lot of different stressors," she said. "There's a veterinary shortage in many areas. Veterinarians are working long hours with a lot of competing demands, and so I think the biggest challenge is adding something else to the plate."

Among the VSA's goals is to make adaptations as accessible as possible. Dense technical details and greenwashing often accompany information about climate change and present barriers to taking action. To that end, VSA is working on shareable materials addressing topics on waste reduction, sustainable procurement and more. For example, it has written about mail-in services that repurpose used nitrile gloves, as well as alternatives, such as models that biodegrade.

A worldwide movement

The movement to make veterinary practice less polluting is a global one.

Vet Sustain in the United Kingdom, a nonprofit created by veterinarians, was a pioneer in creating a carbon calculator for the profession. Launched in late 2022, the tool is U.K.-specific but now comes in versions tailored for Denmark and New Zealand. Since different regions use varying sources for energy, using the calculator specific to the region is the most accurate way to determine the carbon footprint of a practice in that region.

Additionally, Vet Sustain recently released a New Graduate Sustainability Guide that offers advice to veterinarians as they enter the workforce. Tips include asking new employers to schedule sustainability discussions for team meetings, putting "please switch off" stickers next to lights and other equipment commonly left on, and providing reusable scrub hats or allowing veterinarians to bring their own.

In Australia, a nonprofit called Vets for Climate Action (VfCA) was established in response to the country's devastating 2019-20 bushfires, which burned 19 million hectares (more than 73,000 square miles) and affected nearly 3 billion animals, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Drought and other weather factors driven by human-caused climate change have increased the risk of extreme fire in Australia by at least 30% since 1900, according to research published in 2021.

Dr. Elise Anderson, rural and regional program lead of VfCA, said she believes veterinarians should be squarely engaged in discussions about the effects of climate change.

"If we acknowledge that climate change is potentially the biggest threat to the health and welfare of animals across the planet at the moment, then it's just a no-brainer to me that veterinarians, and [the] veterinary profession more broadly, have a role to play in speaking up for animals in the face of climate change," Anderson said.

VfCA offers an online toolkit for incorporating sustainability into veterinary practice. This year, it launched ZerOctober, a challenge to veterinarians to commit to climate action in the month of October. The event is modeled after Pet Dental Health Month, in which veterinarians spotlight the importance of animal dental health during a given month (August in Australia, February in the U.S. and U.K.).

Anderson's role at VfCA focuses on supporting the sustainability efforts of veterinarians in rural areas. Drought and bushfires, two of Australia's primary climate-fueled disasters, disproportionately affect rural areas.

"Cities have this buffering effect, and they also have possibly more access to resources," Anderson said. "People in rural and regional Australia certainly have first-hand lived experience of the impacts of climate change."

At the same time, Anderson says, veterinarians in rural areas may not feel that they can speak out on issues like climate change due to its politically charged nature. Anderson's work offers rural veterinary professionals resources to be effective advocates for climate change, such as "lunch and learn" sessions for veterinary teams, tips on how to interact with elected representatives and advice on how to have difficult conversations about climate change. She believes veterinarians are uniquely positioned to be influential.

Not only are veterinarians great science communicators, translating complex science every day in the consult room, says Anderson, they're also community leaders. "The vets in [rural] communities are deeply embedded there," she said. "They're part of everyday life. You see them in the supermarket, you see them at the sports clubs on the weekend. They've been almost part of people's families and their businesses. So they do have that really trusted position … . Their voice has an incredible impact."